SPRINGFIELD — U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal introduced Margaret Carlson on Monday with some praise for — and a warning about — the news media.

“In a representative democracy, the media is the referee,” said Neal, D-Springfield. “We need them to get it right.”

Carlson, columnist for The Daily Beast and the first woman columnist at Time magazine, proceeded to praise and to criticize President Donald Trump and to handicap the growing field of candidates looking to replace him.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper announced Monday he is running for president as a Democrat.

Carlson named a potential candidate: Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. She called Hogan a Maryland version of Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican governing a Democratic state.

"He's a red governor who is getting it done in a blue state," Carlson said.

Only Hogan, unlike Baker, has talked openly about mounting a primary challenge to Trump.

Carlson spoke Monday before more than 600 business and civic leaders at the Springfield Regional Chamber’s annual Outlook luncheon at the MassMutual Center downtown. It’s the chamber’s biggest even of the year, drawing state lawmakers and mayors from the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires.

She shared the stage at the two-hour event with Neal, newly appointed Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Mike Kennealy, Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno and others.

Carlson praised Trump for walking away from what would have been a bad deal with North Korea presented at the recent summit in Vietnam. But Trump undid some of that good when he, for a time, seemed to take Kim Jong-un’s word about the death of American Otto Warmbier.

She said Trump has demonstrated moral courage in Venezuela by calling for the elected regime there to take power and the defeated leaders to step aside. And Trump did the right thing by walking back what had been described as an immediate pullout of U.S. forces from Syria, Carlson said.

On the negative side, she called attention to Trump’s more than two-hour speech Saturday at a conservative political conference in Washington. In it, Trump cataloged perceived slight after perceived slight.

"You would think he was Irish, the way he remembers all his grudges," Carlson said. "He is declining from being presidential."

She called Trump a master of branding, and said that is a danger to Democrats who risk having him define their candidacies before those candidacies can even get off the ground.

The positive of having six women running — that’s the count so far — is that it makes each individual woman that much more immune from gendered criticisms about likability, an issue that dogged Hillary Clinton in 2016, Carlson said.

Kennealy used his time at the podium to push the Baker administration’s new housing bill, which would make it easier for towns to change zoning to allow for more development.